The Moth (book) edited by Catherine Burns
Review by Brian Masefield
First, a lil’ history. The Moth is a non-profit organization that celebrates the art of storytelling. It kicked off nearly fifteen years ago. Moth “StorySlam” events take place in cities all over the country. Here’s how it goes: A topic for the evening is given in advance. Audience members are encouraged to put their names in a bucket if they feel they have a great, true-life story that fits that evening’s theme. Tickets to Moth events sell out fast online – within minutes. People unable to get those tickets can cue up in-person at the venue before the show for standing room only spots (which they do, hours earlier in some cases). It’s quite a thing, really.
As a Moth fan, I can report that these events are often electrifying evenings. There’s a snap of energy that fills the air every time a person steps up to the mic. One memorable story I witnessed involved a man searching for his pet cat, after the feline snuck out during a fight with his girlfriend. The audience and this storytelling gent were both holding back tears. (The evening’s topic was Animals. Oh, and he found the cat.) And if you can’t make it to an event, there’s even a podcast.
So, what happens when all of this lyrical lightning hits paper? The Moth book has been out for months, and it’s a great subway read. A perfect subway read, actually. Each one of the fifty stories in The Moth book, transcripts of actual stories told at some of the StorySlam events, can be read in about five minutes. Each one has a distinct voice. And each one will take you on an emotional journey while you’re on an MTA-provided one.
What I Liked
The length of the stories is just right. Each story has been blessed with a beginning, a middle, and a misshapen end. The best part of this collection is that most of the stories don’t wrap up in an easy “lesson learned” sorta way. More often than not, the storyteller pulls you through his/her own personal thick patch of fog, and lets you go just as the air begins to clear. In Jeffrey Rudell’s coming out saga Under the Influence, we’re with him every step of the way, and we feel as lost as he does when the reactions to his reveal isn’t quite what he expected. The conclusion feels much more genuine and (indeed) true to life than a happily-ever-after scenario.
There is no synopsis provided for these stories. This is a good thing. Each one contains a challenge the storyteller is faced with. Ed Gavagan’s Whatever Doesn’t Kill Me starts off with harrowing details of Gavagan waking up in a hospital, without the reader finding out why till the next page. The element of surprise consistently pays off in these stories, which is quite a feat since they only have a few pages to create one.
From tale to tale, the tone seesaws. The book smartly adds some humorous stories here and there to douse the dourness of the heavy stuff. And some, like Jon Levin’s Elevator ER, balance both humor and drama beautifully, as does Kimberly Reed’s Life Flight, which has her gender-reassignment process take a backseat to the health of her ailing father.
What I Didn’t Like
A misstep the editor makes with The Moth book is including all of the dialog the storyteller said live when telling their respective tales. Every once in a while, a line like “and as I stand here tonight” pops up and promptly kicks you out of the story. Sure, a live performance of the piece can warrant this type of realization, but it has the opposite effect on the page. In person, this awareness of the audience brings everyone closer together. On the page, it kicks the individual audience member (the reader) out of the club. We weren’t there, and just when we feel closer to being there, we get reminded that we weren’t.
Also odd, more than a few of the book’s stories involve prison. Whether it’s a person serving hard time, someone working in a prison, or someone in a full-on pen pal affair with a prisoner, there’s a story for it in here. I understand that prisons can be the site of many a turning point for people, but they don’t always provide the most intoxicating or interesting of story locales. (I’m not a fan of Shawshank Redemption either, so what do I know.)
There are also some rather high-profile tale tellers in The Moth book, too. Folks like Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, Annie Duke, and Malcolm Gladwell share stories in the book, and interestingly, provide some of the least-satisfying tales. Gladwell’s story, Her Way, about a wedding toast gone wrong, feels so mean-spirited you wonder why he was compelled to share it, let alone give the toast-from-hell in the first place.
These gripes are minor, though. The storytelling itself, the point of this whole shebang, is near addictive. The pacing of these tales is almost always spot on. Read the book. See the show. Listen to the podcast. But, yes, certainly read the book.
